Movie review: 'Changeling'

Friday

Oct 31, 2008 at 2:00 AM

Clint Eastwood's "Changeling" is a period piece, a true-crime mystery and a slice of history, vintage Eastwood in many ways. If the film is too long and a little unwieldy in its later acts, the consummate craftsman in Eastwood glosses over that with detail and righteous rage.

ROGER MOORE

Clint Eastwood's "Changeling" is a period piece, a true-crime mystery and a slice of history, vintage Eastwood in many ways. If the film is too long and a little unwieldy in its later acts, the consummate craftsman in Eastwood glosses over that with detail and righteous rage.

Angelina Jolie plays Christina Collins, a telephone switchboard supervisor and single mom in 1928 Los Angeles. She has to leave her 9-year-old son, Walter, home one Saturday when she's called into work. When she gets home, he's missing.

As horrific as losing a child is, imagine losing one and, months later, having the absolute authority and influence of the Los Angeles Police Department determined to "make this all go away" by giving you a replacement boy, insulting you when you make a fuss, sending doctors around to bolster their case and, when you won't play ball, having you institutionalized.

Eastwood gets at psychiatric bullying and gender issues of those dark ages of yore. In casting the always-cagey John Malkovich as a preacher who takes on Collins' cause, he suggests that we question the man's motives, that Mrs. Collins might be a pawn in a larger Los Angeles chess match.

"Changeling" is a movie with no shortage of villains, starting with the police chief (Colm Feore, gaunt and scary). It packages Jolie in flapper attire and red-red lipstick and demands that she cry "I want my son back!" dozens of times, but it's still one of her most empathetic roles. Amy Ryan has the "Angelina Jolie" role in this "Girl, Interrupted" mental hospital, the patient in a similar fix, the one who explains this nightmare of powerlessness to the new inmate.

But like the similar "Mystic River," "Changeling" is a film without the urgency that the subject demands, and the "eureka" moments don't have the proper kick. "Changeling" is a fascinating, high-minded and ambitious story, with twists and turns and implications far beyond the "true crime" origins of the tale. That it isn't the emotional, surprising and engrossing Oscar contender Eastwood set out to make is one of the bigger disappointments of the fall.

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